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There was nothing pre- about my judgement. It was based on my firsthand experience. You could call it postjudice ;)

I just disagree with a lot of what is "accepted philosophy" - for example I consider concepts and ideas to be "imaginary" which is the opposite of "real". Real things exist and imaginary things do not. This is why they're called "imaginary"... "imagine", "imagination"... all words we associate with non-existence. Kids can use their imagination, but they know what they imagine is NOT REAL.

This is what the search for the Higgs is about, according to modern scientific understanding, all forces have a particle that is associated with them. The particle that accounts for mass vanish long ago sometime just after the big bang, if I remember right.

The collider in Cern is going to smash photons together and try and recreate some higgs bosons for a brief instance, they will never them directly, but they will (maybe?) see the energy decay and particle trails that get left behind.

Gravity and mass exist, we rely on the very fact of that when physics come into question. We might not know why they exist, at least not yet. That is a different question however.

Which kind of mass are you talking about? Without any qualifier, I assume it to be rest mass. Then, according to your views, photons indeed don't exist:

Quoted from Wikipedia:
The fundamental nature of the photon is believed to be understood theoretically; the prevailing Standard Model predicts that the photon is a gauge boson of spin 1, without mass (at rest) and without charge, that results from a local U(1) gauge symmetry and mediates the electromagnetic interaction. However, physicists continue to check for discrepancies between experiment and the Standard Model predictions, in the hope of finding clues to physics beyond the Standard Model. In particular, experimental physicists continue to set ever better upper limits on the charge and mass of the photon; a non-zero value for either parameter would be a serious violation of the Standard Model. However, all experimental data hitherto are consistent with the photon having zero charge and mass.

The way I see it, atheism is the result of a cleaving of the population. In it's broadest sense it is nothing more than a lack of belief in any theistic principles. In this sense it is as sterile a concept as male/female. Sadly, the cleaving does not afford as large a piece of the pie as many other social divisions do!

When somebody says they are an atheist I can only make one assessment. They have no theistic beliefs (unless you consider lack of belief a belief). For so many years the term was used as a catch all for anyone who did not uphold the moral fabric of the established church. Thankfully the ill perceived notion of our morality is losing its stranglehold on the general public. Many people are actually seeing atheism as viable position.

Just as any other large scale slice of the population, atheists are as diverse in morals, ethics, politics, philosophy... and any other descriptive term you can imagine. Some of us are professors and some of us are criminals! The one thing we share is an attitude toward theism.